


Like A Burning City

by shapechanger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship, Slow Burn, Unresolved Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 21:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7191599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shapechanger/pseuds/shapechanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus, Tonks, and some musings on poetry and language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like A Burning City

Remus speaks to her soft-voiced and holds her complete attention, meandering from books to poetry and back again; reminding her of old rhymes about Babylon and candlelight and worlds beyond as he weaves together a gleaming net of words in front of a fire, far too late at night. The time is crawling slowly towards a morning that she doesn't want to come, because daylight is the hourglass measure of waiting, thinking, calculating every move. This isn't. His hands gesture as though to support his words, as though he himself is never quite sure of the weight of them, needs help to balance the impact of their forward motion as they imprint themselves upon the air. Curled in an armchair opposite, cheek resting against the back, head tilted and watching him, Tonks thinks now that she understands more fully what the word _spellbound_ really means. 

It's listening to the cadence of his words as he evokes shades of forgotten realms and mist-covered moors, moving easily between myth and reality. He reaches back as far as Camelot and talking about the old magics that are still rooted deep in the earth, chasing ley lines of language that vibrate through abandoned places and histories crumbling like stone. Within moments, he shifts quite wonderfully into T.S. Eliot with nary a pause or stumble, falls forward deeper still into Pablo Neruda and Edna St. Vincent Millay, his voice low and full of wonder that feels like a secret as he says the words _love like a burning city._

There's another type of magic to this quiet communion, the rhythm of words, that has nothing to do with charmwork or curses, or the fact that together they sit, a metamorphmagus and a werewolf, in the middle of a war that might see them both dead before the next few months are out. It has everything to do with the way that he watches her, sometimes troubled, sometimes with the strangest tinge of delight, and rarely, so rarely, the odd slip of something very like fascination, a hint of deeper warmth, perhaps even desire that is all too human despite the monster that others would have him believe himself to be, the risk that he feels he represents. That he lets his control slip even that infinitesimal amount is something that she grasps onto, hides deep within herself like a treasure without pushing him for more than he is willing to give her. She can be patient, until he is wise, and if he never is, then they still have this. She knows, and for now, the knowing itself is enough.

Tonks wants him laid bare by his poetry, wants the chance to fathom out each syllable that he speaks to her. He isn't resisting her just now when she softly requests to hear more, please; instead he continues to speak, low and mellifluous, laying each sentence before her like a gift, as though he senses that they both need this, badly need the connection. She doesn't have the eloquence that he does, the ability to order all of her thoughts and string them together in a seeming combination of delicate lights and iron chains both. She wonders if she'd find her words if he kissed her, if he scraped his teeth gently along the sensitive place on her lower lip and made her tremble. It's an imagining that haunts her, hours after they part with a goodnight that lingers in the twilight between longer than is strictly polite for two colleagues and not long enough for whatever it is they're becoming.

It's alone in her bed that she concludes with unerring certainty that words are _dangerous_ , and yet she's never felt safer.

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't quite fit into anything that I was already writing, so consider it in the nature of an experiment. The poem that Remus references, albeit briefly, and the inspiration for the title of this piece is a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay.


End file.
